Stephen W. Browne, writing in Atlasphere. He’s been noticing what I’ve been noticing:

I have noticed something about how some people treat beliefs which are personally important to them. When faced with uncomfortable facts, they do what I call “making up stories.”

I don’t mean they lie. Or rather they do, but they’re lying to themselves, and in a very particular way.

Some examples: About seven years ago, I was taking a course in the Polish city of Wroclaw. While there, I shared an apartment with an Englishman who had a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.

This fellow was convinced of every fashionable environmental catastrophe, including, of course, global warming.

I am skeptical about man-caused global warming for reasons not relevant here. In the course of our discussions, I mentioned that when I was working to launch a new college of science in Poland, I had come to know quite a few members of the Polish Academy of Science in the departments of chemistry, physics, paleobiology, etc.

I told him that not one of these world-class scientists believed in man-caused global warming.

He replied, “That’s because their jobs depend on defending the oil companies and denying global warming.”

To begin with, that’s not true. On the contrary, the Polish government at the time had no concerns about global warming. They had too many real problems to deal with. And he was a stranger to Poland who couldn’t have known one way or the other.
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In my newsroom not long ago, I brought up on my computer screen a picture of President Obama shaking the Emperor of Japan’s hand and bowing low.

I showed this to a colleague and said that our president had really stepped in it again, after the flap about bowing submissively to the King of Saudi Arabia, then and treating the Queen of England with undiplomatic familiarity.

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked.

I pointed out that American presidents — heck, American citizens — do not bow in submission to any foreign monarchs. There are long-established diplomatic courtesies appropriate for citizens of a free country, which show respect for but not submission to foreign monarchs — courtesies our president entirely omitted when meeting Queen Elizabeth II.

Furthermore, I said, in Japan bowing has gradations and subtleties indicating relative status, that non-Japanese seldom get right. Foreigners doing business in the country are generally advised not to try.

She replied, “Well maybe he’s creating a new custom, blending the customs of America and Japan.”

And when we go to the movies, we see they’re chock full of ninety-pound women karate chopping three hundred pound men through brick walls. It defies lots of laws of physics, but it makes (certain) people feel good.

Funny thing is though, that reality is what makes you feel good — if, and only if, reality is connected in some way to your continuing survival. If you’re about to crawl under a car, nothing will make you feel good short of solid evidence that the jack is going to hold it up. We conflate reality with fantasy when we’re able to. When we can afford it.

And this is, in a nutshell, why progressive politics become more popular as communication becomes more efficient and technology becomes more advanced. It isn’t because the human race is evolving into a species of brilliant thinkers. It is because we become more comfortable, and with that comfort comes a capacity for tolerating nonsense.

And an ability to, should the need arise, manufacture some of it.

Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes.

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